Less than 10% of people on benefits are classed as unemployed.
Approximately 7% of all benefit claimants are receiving benefits principally due to unemployment—though this figure rises to 17% when looking only at working-age benefit claimants.
Less than 1% of benefits are claimed fraudulently.
False. In the last financial year 2.8% of benefits expenditure was overpayments due to fraud.
Tax avoidance and evasion cost the country around 100 times more than benefit fraud.
False. The latest official government figures suggest tax avoidance and evasion losses were approximately 1.2 times higher than benefit fraud. Alternative estimates suggest tax losses may be much higher, but still don’t support this claim.
A post shared thousands of times on Facebook contains multiple claims about benefits, including that tax avoidance and evasion cost the UK “100 times more” than benefit fraud.
But these claims are either false or missing context, and the comparison of the scale of benefit fraud compared to the scale of tax avoidance and evasion is not accurate.
We’ve previously fact checked a number of similar posts that have attempted to compare benefit fraud and tax avoidance or evasion. Claims like these can spread far and fast online and are often difficult to contain or correct.
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The post claims: “Less than 10% of people on benefits are classed as unemployed.”
According to the latest figures, as of August 2024 approximately 24 million people in Great Britain, including 9.9 million people of working age (between 16 and 64), were claiming some combination of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefits.
Unemployment is typically defined as being available and looking for work but not working. In the three months from July to September 2024, unemployment in Great Britain stood at approximately 1.5 million. However, not everyone who is unemployed claims benefits, so this figure can’t be used to assess the proportion of benefit claimants who are unemployed.
A measure used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to indicate the number of people claiming benefits primarily due to unemployment is known as the ‘claimant count’.
This includes all benefit claimants who are claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance plus those claiming Universal Credit who are required to seek work.
As of August 2024 the claimant count for Great Britain was approximately 1.7 million—around 7% of all benefit claimants (including those above State Pension age), and 17% of all working-age benefit claimants.
This doesn’t mean, however, that all working-age benefit claimants who aren’t included in the ‘claimant count’ are in work—many are economically inactive. These individuals aren’t working and aren’t looking for work, for reasons such as sickness or caring responsibilities.
It’s worth noting that since the introduction of Universal Credit in 2016, the claimant count has been considered less reliable as an indicator of long-term trends in unemployment.
The post also claims that “less than 1% of benefits are claimed fraudulently”.
This isn’t correct, as this figure is too low. The latest figures show that in 2023/24 2.8% (or £7.4 billion) of benefits expenditure was overpaid due to fraud.
This is a slight increase on the previous financial year, when overpayments due to fraud accounted for 2.7%, or £6.3 billion, of benefits expenditure.
Finally, the post claims that “tax avoidance and evasion costs the country around 100 times more than benefit fraud”.
This is also not correct. His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) estimates that the tax gap—the difference between the amount the government collects in tax revenue and the amount it should in theory collect—in the 2022/23 financial year was £39.8 billion, the most recent data shows.
This is approximately six times higher than the amount in benefits overpaid due to fraud over the same period.
Of the total tax gap, an estimated £5.5 billion was due to tax evasion (illegal non-payment or underpayment of tax), with £1.8 billion due to tax avoidance (avoiding paying tax through schemes that operate “within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law”).
This means the total estimated to have been lost due to avoidance and evasion specifically in 2022/23 was approximately 1.2 times higher than the amount overpaid due to benefit fraud.
Alternative estimates of the tax gap have been published by the economist Richard Murphy, who argues that HMRC significantly understates the amount of tax revenue lost to evasion, avoidance and debt.
In response to the publication of the most recent HMRC tax gap estimate (for 2022/23), Mr Murphy told the Guardian that the amount of tax not being collected could be closer to £100 billion.
In a report published last month the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee stated that HMRC was “likely to have underestimated the scale” of tax evasion specifically.
We’ve written more about HMRC’s tax gap estimates in a previous fact check.
Regardless, none of these figures support the claim that tax evasion and avoidance cost “100 times more” than benefit fraud, and we could find no evidence that indicated the claim is correct.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because it’s not true that less than 1% of benefits are claimed fraudulently or that 100 times more money is lost to tax avoidance and evasion than benefit fraud.
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